


Guardian

by pettiot



Series: Professionals Timeline [8]
Category: The Professionals (TV 1977)
Genre: Fantastical, Haunting, M/M, ghost story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-03
Updated: 2010-10-03
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:21:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22241728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pettiot/pseuds/pettiot
Summary: Doyle stands guard against Bodie's ghosts.
Relationships: Ray Doyle/Bodie
Series: Professionals Timeline [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1600894
Kudos: 2





	Guardian

  


The grief woke him, juddering, metal scraping on a wet road.

From the rug on which he sprawled, Ray rolled to standing and fastened his jeans. His hands clenched around his waistband, he was unsteady. His shirt and boots were not in sight.

It was the least of his concern. When he had fallen to sleep, it had been on a sofa.

Adrenaline offered no friendly jolt to ambush him into true waking.

Ray heard a cat scuffling on an unlikely tin roof, a bird's scratching mortality, and a distant jangling siren of no pitch or rhythm that DC Raymond Doyle had ever known. The room was small. One wall had a sink, which dripped at irregular intervals into a bucket optimistically painted with daisies, recognisable as such on the second glance.

The flat was too hot to be in London.

Mismatched tiles clustered on the wall behind the sink. A guitar leaned against another corner, missing a peg, and the thinnest string. There were two pairs of combat boots by the door, one pair very small, but both worn. The left boot of the larger pair was missing a lace, having donated it to the service of the smaller. Rumpled clothes marked a passionate trail across the room.

Eyes only, Ray followed the trail, but bore little expectation of sighting his shirt. He did see tiny yellow knickers, girl-damp crotch shamelessly skyward, and a man's tie still noosed.

The cheapness of the tie jarred. Ray had never known Bodie to skimp on himself.

This was nowhere Ray had ever been, except for the time he dreamed this before. The details had been different then: red roses, a sniper's kit, a cigarette. A black collar coiled like a snake, buckled but neatly cut through, as if by the bloodied knife that lay beside the leather.

The anguish came from Bodie's bed. Draped mosquito nets gave presence to the slumbering form.

The grief made Ray's body unfamiliar, bruised and weak. It seemed to him that he approached very carefully, bare feet tender on the rug, then the concrete, yet with no true memory of having taken a step, he was there. The nets fell soundlessly, the same as they did the time he dreamed this before, white pooling around the mattress, the slumbering form, and the watcher.

She was so very small, to contain so much grief.

Ray's hands clenched, then released. He swallowed an involuntary sound.

She wasn't Marika.

Ray thought these were his own nightmares, but he could not have dreamed a woman he never knew. Could he? The disbelief would be dealt with tomorrow. For now, Ray breathed the air of a foreign city, certain he was standing in a one-room flat above a shop that he knew, for no good reason, made its way on selling bread and international newspapers. Who was he to question unlikely knowledge? He was looking at the first girl a young, newly-ex mercenary had loved.

Her eyes were dark. She wore a wool skirt, inappropriate for the heat, and some thing of the formlessness suggested that she stopped at the waist. Ray would not have called her elfin, mischievous, gamin, but she would have been, had she been alive. He would never have thought this wisp could be Bodie's type; Bodie had worked hard at avoiding comparison.

She shook Bodie by the shoulder. When that failed to disturb his sleep, she pulled back and made a fist.

Ray reached twice before he could touch her. 'No. You let him sleep.'

She webbed her fingers through his. Her eyes hurt to look at, so Ray focused on their hands. Perhaps this one wouldn't be as bad as Marika.

'D-d-don't – need—'

Stroking his thumb across her knuckles, Ray inched around the bed. 'Know you don't want to hurt him, love. But you let him rest.'

'Need-d—'

'Compel him to attend you just the same, and then all this will turn to lament.' Ray looked around the flat, fiercely for the sting in his eyes; squalid it might be, but there was such love in the details. 'He's loved you, avenged you. Let it go – or do you want this to burn?'

'C-c-old—'

'I know what that's like, wanting him to feel the loss as bad as you. But I'm not letting you do it. He just doesn't have nightmares, see, not even cheese-mares or chow mein monsters. I won't let you start giving them to him now.'

Ray stood by her, and cupped her cold hands to his heart.

'Would've let you do it a few years ago, you know. Would've said the bugger deserved a haunting. It used to scare me, how easily he slept, scared me more than if he'd woken screaming on a regular basis. What kind of monster was he? After everything he'd done in his life, that'd been done to him, what _we_ did to people – some things we saw — and there he was. The nights I can't sleep, sick with the lack, he drifts away from me on a blessed bloody tide. A defiance of the day just been. Bred into his very nature – not _carelessness_ , not uncaring, just nothing I could define.'

This close, the move was a formality. Ray took the sad thing full into his embrace, and soothed along the knots of her spine.

'I worked it out. It's not bad, having a good night's sleep. Can't make him bad. He's lived the terror once, why live it again? So what if he doesn't regret death, our William, doesn't regret killing – the only thing he regrets is a wasted life. You knew him. He would never have let you regret a single heartbeat of yours.'

The ghost felt scratchy, thin, like a bundle of twigs bound into a shape. Less thorn than Marika had, that one left Ray bloodied, battered. But this one hurt him worse, with how fragile she was in his arms, the dryness almost tinder-like. Ray was wary of what sparks here might do to Bodie.

'So you let him sleep on. For me, if not for him. I'll mourn you all you want.'

The pang of loss nearly brought Ray to his knees.

'Aw, love! He might never have mourned you loudly, but I'll bet he loved you loud enough. Now that's enough.'

  



End file.
